TITLE: AN AFTERNOON OF NATURE-BASED COMPUTATION Talk1, Gene Regulatory Optimization, an Alternate Representation in Evolutionary Computation Talk2, Natural Computation in Finance   Speaker: Prof. Dan Ashlock, University of Guelph, Canada Prof Anthony Brabazon, School of Business at University College Dublin, Ireland   Date:8/29 (Monday) Time: 2:00PM~3:00PM, 3:30PM~4:30PM Venue: Bldg 301, Room 102   Abstract 1: In nature, regulatory genes determine which part of an organism's gnome is expressed.  In this talk we examine a simple regulatory mechanism that modifies linear representations for evolutionary computation.  The regulatory mechanism substantially enhances exploration at the expense of exploitation.  For complex, polymodal fitness landscapes the modification yields a substantial improvement in optimization performance.  A negative control example is designed that demonstrates the technique yields a remarkable degradation of performance on a unimodal optimization problem designed to interact poorly with the technique.  A variety of problems including the self avoiding walk, real-valued optimization, and genetic programming tasks are examined.  This technique is generic across linear representations and, in the problems examined thus far, improves performance more when the problem in question is difficult.   Abstract 2: Biologically-inspired computing can be broadly defined as the development of computational methods and algorithms which draw metaphorical inspiration from phenomena that occur in the natural biological world. ‘Earning a lunch’ in an ever-changing natural environment bears parallel with ‘profitable survival’ in ever-changing financial markets. This seminar will overview a number of biologically-inspired algorithms which can be used for optimisation and model-induction purposes, and which therefore have useful potential for academic application or for incorporation into financial software for applications as diverse as fraud detection, asset selection and algorithmic trading. No prior exposure to biologically-inspired computing will be assumed and hence the seminar should be accessible to either business or computer science attendees.     Biography 1: Daniel Ashlock is a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics holding a chair in bioinformatics at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. He received his doctorate in mathematics from Caltech in 1984 and has worked at Iowa State University as well as Guelph.  He is a senior member of the IEEE with over 175 peer reviewed scientific publications.  Dr. Ashlock serves as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, the Transaction on Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Games, the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and Biosystems.  His research areas include evolutionary computation, especially in the area of representation, as well as bioinformatics, games, and combinatorics.   Biography 2: Professor Anthony Brabazon is currently Head of Research in the School of Business at University College Dublin, Ireland.  His primary research interests concern the development of natural computing theory and the application of natural computing algorithms to real-world problems, particularly in the domain of finance. He has an established publication record in the field of evolutionary computation / natural computing with in excess of 150 peer-reviewed publication. These include some thirteen authored / edited books (finance-related titles include 'Biologically Inspired Algorithms for Financial Modelling' and 'Natural Computing in Computational Finance' (Volumes I, II, III and IV),  all published by Springer. As well as sitting on the editorial boards of several journals, Anthony has undertaken multiple external examiner appointments, and is a regular reviewer for a wide range of journals in natural computing, operations research and finance. He is a regular member of programme committees at major conferences in the field of natural computing, including GECCO (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference), IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, and EuroGP (European Conference on Genetic Programming). Anthony is also Director of the Financial Mathematics Computation Research Cluster (FMC2)  (see http://www.fmc-cluster.org).  FMC2 is a collaboration between industry and several universities funded by Science Foundation Ireland and industry encompassing over 40 active researchers. In addition to directing FMC2, he is co-director of the Natural Computing Research and Applications Group at UCD (see http://ncra.ucd.ie). The NCRA engages in both basic and applied research in natural computing methodologies and employs some 20 researchers.